


Que Sera Sera

by THE_Backwards



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Childhood Trauma, Divorce, Eating Disorders, My First Fanfic, Self-Harm, Trauma, Trust Issues, am i projecting?, yes - Freeform, yes I am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-17 08:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18961900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/THE_Backwards/pseuds/THE_Backwards
Summary: The Handler wasn’t always like this.Her story started with a young girl named Elvira.





	Que Sera Sera

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to reiterate that this has some rough content. Read at your own risk.
> 
> More notes at the end.

The Handler never saw herself as a _bad_ person. Her actions were calculated and ruthless, certainly, but she wasn’t _bad_ . She _certainly_ wasn’t evil. And if she was, well, The Handler wasn’t always like this.

Her story started with a young girl named Elvira.

Elvira was three years old, not quite four, and she was happy. She had two loving parents and attended a daycare run from a woman’s house with several other children. The other kids were quite fond of her, and she was well liked by the woman who ran the daycare. She was also well liked by the woman’s sons.

The woman, her name doesn’t matter at this point, it’s long forgotten and buried with any other unfortunate memories of that place, had two sons. The younger was sweet, sixteen and gentle. He kept hermit crabs, let Elvira hold them, always had a smile waiting for her when she cried. She liked him. The older son, on the other hand.

He was eighteen and, well, he was nice enough. But he had a side no one else saw. He was never mean, never cruel, but he _did_ things.

The memories never left her mind, how he’d make his way to her cot during nap time, how his fingers lingered all over her, tracing patterns over her skin with cold touches. They even went to far as to invade her a few times. She didn’t understand what was happening. All Elvira knew was that she was young and scared and he shouldn’t be touching her like _that_.

She told her parents. They told the police. She remembered sitting on their beat up green sofa, squished between her mother and father, relaying her story to the officer. He laughed. She cried. They never pressed charges.

Her father left the following year. He didn’t _really_ leave, but he did move out. She still saw him, but it was different. _He_ was different. He wasn’t the same man she once knew. He was meaner, less patient. She was afraid of him.

Elvira had always had issues with noise, her father knew that. He didn’t seem to care. He yelled when he was mad. When he deemed her in need of punishment, he spanked her, _hard_. It hurt. She cried. She did her best not to anger him.

The divorce was finalized when she was seven. It was no surprise at that point, but it was another nail in young Elvira’s proverbial coffin even so. She lost a part of herself in that divorce, the second piece of her she’d lost. Her downward spiral began not long after.

Elvira grew up without many friends, not real friends. Everyone liked her well enough, but never enough to get close.

She was twelve when the depression hit. Her wrist became her canvas, carving thin pale lines into skin as she fell further and further into despair. She didn’t know why she did it at first, couldn’t tell anyone if they’d noticed, but she figured it out soon enough.

It was the _control_ . Elvira’s experiences had left her with problems, no surprises there, problems with power, problems with control, with abandonment, with _people_. She had a problem with unpredictability.

She never learned to drive. It was the same reason, the other drivers, the lack of control. The control moved her, drove her to everything. It pushed her to starve herself, to learn the subtle art of manipulation, the excel in school. The more she pushed herself, the more in control she felt. But the problem of others remained.

Free will was such a _pesky_ little thing.

The idea struck when she was nineteen. The train ride home from her place of work had been particularly bad, a man pressed up against her, crowded into her space, grinding against her back. The past bubbled up and Elvira stood there, frozen by her memory. The man left eventually, but the feeling remained.

 _Free will. The unpredictability of man._ It was just another problem, but how could she solve it?

_Time travel._

She began running equations, her mind spinning with numbers and variables. She took over the basement of her childhood home, painted it all with chalkboard paint, covered the walls and floors and sometimes even ceiling in charts and diagrams, probabilities, dates, times.

On February 7, 2019, she cracked the code.

Time flew by after that, or didn’t now that she had all of it at her fingertips, and Elvira was soon caught up in the swirl of a new company, a new profession. She was in _control_. She could handle whatever the world threw at her and it would all end up the same. What would be would be.

Somewhere along the way, what was left of Elvira was lost. The Handler remained of course, able to justify her own struggles and pain under the idea that it was meant to happen. Were she never to have gone through such atrocities as a child, she would never have made it were she was. It was all supposed to happen. _The Commission_ was supposed to happen. The ends justify the means.

She was never bad, never _evil_ . No, The Handler, _Elvira_ , was once young and brilliant and oh so afraid. All she was now was in control.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: Elvira means truth.
> 
> I wrote this after a soul-searching session where I realized that someone put through the same things as I've been through could have easily broken into the woman that we see in the show. So, while perhaps The Handler isn't the healthiest character to project onto, I gave her my trauma. Kudos and comments are appreciated!


End file.
